More TPP firsts for Plymouth

Plymouth Community Healthcare is set to finish implementing TPP’s SystmOne in June, with a mental health e-prescribing pilot due to take place this spring.

The community interest company is one of nine child and community health providers in the South rolling-out SystmOne as part of a £32 million project backed by central funding for organisations that received nothing from the National Programme for IT.

It started its roll-out in December 2013, and became the first site to go-live with the SystmOne mental health module last July.

Graham Sykes, the CIC’s head of IT, told EHI it will roll-out systems for specialist nursing, therapies and wellbeing, district nursing and community hospitals between February and June this year.

Plymouth Community Healthcare also working with TPP to develop a pilot for mental health e-prescribing.

The mental health module as deployed includes the ability to record Mental Health Act information, a care programme approach, mental health clustering tool assessments and reviews, and the collection of the mental health and learning disabilities data set.

Sykes said the system is functioning well, with staff adjusting to it, and taking advantage of its mobile working capabilities.

Angie Kerley, Plymouth’s clinical change manager, said clinicians can now download their full caseload onto a mobile device, giving them access to a patient’s electronic record in the event of an unplanned visit.

“When you get a call from someone – when it’s not planned work but you have to go see them – you can have your case notes on you; whereas in the past you’d have to go back to collect the notes,” she said.

Once the roll-outs are completed, Sykes said the organisation’s focus will shift from deployment to delivering change and making sure that staff get maximum benefit from the system.

He said the CIC also wants to see the mental health module taken up by other NHS organisations and trusts, allowing it to share its own experiences and benefit from the establishment of a wider community.

“The more people who use it, the more benefits there are for us because it’s a wider community and we can get shared learning.”

The nine providers in the South who have signed contracts with TPP are: Plymouth Community Healthcare; Dorset Healthcare University NHS Foundation Trust; Sirona Healthcare; Peninsula Community Healthcare; Gloucestershire Care Services NHS Trust; East Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust; Kent Community Health NHS Trust; Sussex Community NHS Trust and SEQOL social enterprise.

TPP, with Accenture, is delivering deployment support, application integration, data migration, hosting and ongoing technical support to each of the NHS organisations under separate contracts.

Read a full report of Sam Sachdeva’s  recent visit to Plymouth to see the TPP system in action in Insight this week.